Today, clinical health platform Vera Health announced a $28.5 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures, with participation from Optum Ventures, the healthcare venture firm backed by UnitedHealth Group, Mantis VC and SV Angel.

Vera Health is a clinical AI search engine that reasons like a clinician, helping physicians find and evaluate medical evidence in seconds while clearly presenting the sources, strength and limitations behind every answer. The platform is HIPAA- and GDPR-compliant and SOC 2 Type II certified.

Existing investors Y Combinator and Gradient increased their backing in the round, bringing the company's total funding to $32 million.

Co-founded by French entrepreneur and investor Maxime Allouch and Moroccan Taieb Bennani, Vera Health was initially developed for the founders' fathers, who are physicians. What began with two users has grown into a platform used by more than 800,000 clinicians worldwide.

I spoke to Bennani to learn more.

With a new scientific paper published roughly every 20 seconds, physicians face an expanding body of medical research. Unlike conventional AI chatbots, Vera searches more than 60 million scientific publications, clinical guidelines and drug labels to evaluate the evidence before generating an answer. Every claim is linked to its supporting research and colour-coded to indicate the strength of the available evidence.

A rare condition, for example, may have no large randomised trial or comprehensive guideline behind it, leaving only a small case series or a report involving a single patient. Vera surfaces that research while making its limitations visible, allowing physicians to assess how much weight the findings deserve.

From six to 12 employees, and 800,000 clinicians worldwide

Vera Health has reached clinicians across 190 countries, including approximately one in four physicians in Spain and Italy and one in seven in France, while growing its team from six to just 12 employees. Clinicians have gone from asking Vera a few thousand questions a day to hundreds of thousands.

Only a few months after raising its Series A, the company had more daily active users than it had monthly active users at the time of the raise. Much of that growth has happened through physician referrals. The team also visited clinicians in their workplaces, observed their daily routines and attended medical congresses and events, particularly in France, Spain and Italy.

“We built Vera with clinicians, and clinicians did the rest. They’re the best data scientists I’ve ever met: every day, they make sense of more evidence than any human could ever read, often in seconds.

That also makes them the toughest users you can build for. They check the sources, test every answer against what they know, and drop a tool the moment it lets them down. But when a tool earns their trust, they tell their colleagues.”

According to Bennani, once approximately 10 per cent of a country's doctors begin using Vera, growth tends to accelerate organically as more clinicians encounter the platform through colleagues.

Why a doctor in Lyon needs a different answer from one in Chicago

Vera's local-first approach accounts for differences in clinical guidance between countries. A cardiologist in Lyon, for example, may follow European and French guidelines that differ from those used by a colleague in Chicago.

“So for a doctor in France, Vera puts French and European guidance first, reads French-language sources alongside the international literature, and answers in French.

The rest of the world’s evidence is still there, and every claim shows exactly where it comes from, so clinicians always know which framework they’re looking at.”

Through Vera Spaces, health systems can also incorporate their own clinical protocols and pathways alongside national guidelines and international medical literature. Vera tailors responses to medical specialities, providing detailed research for oncologists or concise, time-critical answers for emergency physicians.

“That’s why we don’t think in terms of country versions. We believe every clinician needs their own version of Vera,” said Bennani.

When medical evidence contradicts itself

I wanted to understand how Vera Health evaluates the reliability of medical research and handles situations where clinical studies or national guidelines contradict one another.

Vera developed its evidence-ranking system alongside clinicians who write medical guidelines, refining its assessments against expert judgement. It evaluates research based on study design, evidence quality, cohort size, risk of bias, recency and citation impact.

When studies or national guidelines conflict, Vera highlights the disagreements, the relative strength of competing evidence and which guidance applies locally, rather than presenting a single definitive answer.

“Language models are built to sound certain; medicine rarely is,” explained Bennani.

“And sometimes the honest answer is that the literature doesn’t allow a conclusion yet. Saying so clearly is part of the job.”

Even established medical journals have come under scrutiny for publishing fraudulent or manipulated research, raising questions about how AI systems can distinguish reliable evidence from potentially compromised scientific studies.

“The journal is one part of our ranking, but it’s weighed alongside everything else we know about the paper, so a prestigious name can’t carry a weak study on its own.”

Vera assesses studies by methodology rather than authors' descriptions and checks for retractions.

“The most important safeguard is that no single paper carries an answer on its own. Vera weighs every study against the rest of the evidence on the same question: systematic reviews, guidelines, other trials.”

Quality control continues after answers are generated. AI-based evaluators, trained using blinded clinical reviews, assess real responses daily, with potential safety concerns escalated to a human team member within minutes. Clinicians can also flag questionable responses, with confirmed issues incorporated into the company's permanent testing process.

However, Vera is intended to support clinical judgement rather than replace it.

“Vera doesn’t make clinical recommendations. It shows clinicians what the evidence says, how strong it is and where it stops, so they can judge it for themselves.”

Free for doctors, paid for by hospitals

Vera is built exclusively for healthcare professionals and is free for licensed clinicians and medical trainees worldwide. According to Bennani, it will stay that way.

“Access to the best medical knowledge shouldn’t depend on where you practice, or on whether your hospital can afford it.

Our approach is bottom-up. Clinicians adopt Vera first, on their own, and then their institutions come to us.

Once a large share of a hospital’s teams uses Vera every day, the question is no longer whether to adopt it, but how to integrate it. That’s what we monetise today: a more tailored version of Vera, more deeply integrated into the institution. At this stage, that’s how Vera makes money, which is why we don’t run ads.”

The company also partners with medical societies, publishers and health systems. The American College of Emergency Physicians' clinical policies, for example, are now available inside Vera with full attribution.

“But the line is clear: no partner can buy a better place for its content, or change an answer, its sources or its level of evidence. Every source is weighed on its methodology, the same way for everyone,” said Bennani.

For Vera, Europe's regulatory demands are a feature, not a barrier

Europe is central to Vera's growth strategy. The company has made its first European hire in Berlin and plans to recruit in additional countries to strengthen relationships with clinicians and healthcare systems.

“Europe isn’t a second market for us. It’s where Vera took off, and it’s where we’re investing.”

Bennani also sees Europe's stringent AI and health data regulations as a competitive advantage rather than an obstacle, particularly in healthcare, where trust and transparency are essential to adoption.

Europe’s demanding rules on AI and health data are often described as a handicap. I see the opposite. In a field where trust is the first thing that limits adoption, a high bar for proof is an advantage, as long as the rules are clear.”

Beyond Europe, Bennani's ambitions are shaped by his upbringing in Morocco, where he saw clinicians delivering care with far fewer resources than their counterparts in wealthier healthcare systems.

“Growing up in Morocco, I saw clinicians do remarkable work with a fraction of the resources available where most medical research is done.

It taught me that health equity starts with knowledge: where a clinician practices should never decide what they can know.”

From 17 years to seconds: Vera's ambitions for medical knowledge

The funding will support Vera's clinical evidence infrastructure, international expansion and partnerships with medical societies, publishers and health systems, alongside deeper integration of local guidelines and institutional protocols.

New medical knowledge takes an estimated 17 years to reach routine clinical practice, according to research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Vera Health aims to reduce the time physicians spend searching for and evaluating that knowledge, bringing relevant evidence closer to the moment clinical decisions are made.

“Our mission is to close the gap between what medicine knows and what every patient receives,” said Bennani.

“Today, that gap is measured in years. We want it measured in seconds.”